I am a Physiotherapist and part of the leadership team at pt Health, a national outpatient physical rehabilitation company with 80 clinic locations across the country. Somewhat new to my role in Quality Improvement at pt Health, I attended my first Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Forum and Health Quality Transformation conferences in 2016. At the same conferences in 2017, I was introduced to Change Day and I made my first pledge with a colleague and diverse group of health care professionals that were sitting at my table. I remember enjoying speaking with like minded people about what we could do to take better care of ourselves so that we could in turn take better care of our patients and teams. That year, I made two other pledges in my role with pt Health as well as a Board member of the Ontario Physiotherapy Association (OPA).

Following the conferences I decided to use our internal company website and national town halls to promote Change Day and encourage all of our teams to take a moment to think about what they could do to make a positive change. Through this initiative, we were able to make 24 pledges and we saw participation from clinicians in the field as well as our administrative, human resources, finance, technology and marketing teams.

This year we decided to ramp it up a notch and we hope to get even more! We created a quick launch video and shared it on our internal website. We also incorporated change day into our employee gamification program called “Team Nation’s Gladiators”.

Each month our teams compete doing challenges that align with our values, culture and promote our business. For October we made Change Day the featured challenge giving points for submitting a Change Day pledge, for sharing it on social media, for making a quick pledge video, and bonus points if you did all three!

This year I pledged to consider the visible and invisible battles that others may be fighting and approach them with kindness. The OPA Directors pledged to be advocates for enhancing patient access to physiotherapy services in Ontario!

We all want our patients to have a great experience and clinical outcomes that align with their goals, so Change Day is an initiative that is easy to get behind. As a company, pt Health solicits and listens to patient feedback daily and we are always looking for ways we can improve. Regardless of our role, taking time to think about how we each influence the patient experience is important. How would we want our loved ones to be treated? What would we want our own health care providers to do differently?

We are well on our way to a successful 2018 Change Day with more than 30 pledges thus far. We’d like to thank the pt Health team across the country and our patients for giving us the privilege of being a part of their healthcare team!